


Doors

by jtsbar



Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-16
Updated: 2014-08-16
Packaged: 2018-02-13 09:26:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2145549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jtsbar/pseuds/jtsbar





	Doors

Doors.  
Never refuge.  
Fear.  
Shadows for his daddy to walk through and pull him out from behind of. Then beat the living shit out of him.  
He practiced his counting. Counting blows, back, shoulder, the kid-soft places under his ribs.  
Seconds bleeding into minutes.  
Pretty much came to hate doors. Useless. Useless as words. Not a one of those either - not sorry, help, no, or Merle, or Mama – no words ever done any more to save him than doors had.  
So he took off away from them all, out into the open, to slide out of sight, into the day's shadows and the night's moon-ghosted black

But now here he is behind doors again, hiding from a different kind of braindead stumbling motherfucker...  
one of them back of this particular door, thudding it over and over against the deader body blocking its way out

Hasn't mattered to him what they'd been in life. That question seemed to matter to Rick and some of the others.  
Never has to him before, except once, when what had been Sophia stumbled out of the barn.  
But it matters now  
Because the thing - pushing at the door - might, just might...  
if the knife he's pounding into the floor and wall, and maybe in the next second or two into his own sorry flesh, really is her knife  
that mindless hungry thing on the other side of the door might have been …  
the knife comes down right next to his leg  
it might have been...  
slams it into the wall next to his ribs  
_Can't say it Can't hardly think it_  
knife floor knife wall knife  
_Might've been her_  
_What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?_  
Rick answered that question for Sophia. 

Daryl knows  
He knows  
The knowing of it isn't in his head, it's on his back, on his shoulders, burning, breaking him, like each whip of his daddy's belt, buckle slicing up into those places under his ribs  
What if the dead thing behind the door is Carol? What if those pieces they buried weren't her? What if she dropped her knife and stumbled with her last living step behind that door? 

Words snarl around his throat, _either it's her, what used to be her, and you do this one last thing for her, better than dropping flowers on a grave she ain't even in_  
_Or she is in that grave, dirt opened and bits of her set in, peaceful. Then it's not her shadow back of this door, and you can end the thing that ended her_  
_knife hand skull_  
_end it go back to your sorrowin' it's simple_

 _But it was never simple with her_  
_Should have been. Should have been simple, and quiet, the way it could be quiet between her and me, just hearing the night and us breathing_  
_Waking up smiling_  
_She did that_  
_Should've just been life, whatever her and me could've made of it_

__

_But now all that's left is to open this_  
_door_


End file.
